After that I couldn’t go back to my study, my computer, my safety blanket, so I sat on the couch downstairs. I could always watch TV, but what for? It would be crammed with cheerful people selling anything from exercise machines to funeral plans. I would go for another walk, this time alone. Butch could look after Ms Motsepe and the house, confusing any would-be burglars about any consistency in my life. I could walk in such a way that I avoided the main road with its bloody headlines, and did.
Everything looked so orderly, so allegedly normal, yet the country was at war with itself. People walked or drove around, looking for ways to rob, rape, kill. There was a new minority ruling the country.
And there was still a bit of a chill in the air. Strange how the seasons were changing. Every year winter came a little later and therefore ended a little later. Nothing was what it used to be, you hear yourself thinking. How often you had scoffed at those who said the same thing. But it was true. In the past the summers had been as regular as clockwork. It was a rule that on the first day of spring it would rain. The day would start as bright and fresh as an apple blossom. By midday the air would start thickening, the sound of Maria’s ironing board creaking in the heavy heat. By four the billowing clouds would have turned black, with a wind being whipped up before the first heavy drops of rain hit the hot driveway, almost lazily stirring up the smell of dust, the sight of steam. Those heavy clouds would release their load and the front lawn would be under water in minutes as you stood at the window, staring, mouth open. Almost as soon as it had started, it was over. The air was clean, renewed. You ran barefoot in the sodden, splashing grass.
But this was a confused, delayed spring. It was cold, warm, and the clouds didn’t quite do their work. Maybe it was some sort of sign that I had to change too. But how? Maybe I should take the whole thing of emigrating more seriously. Maybe I should go and live somewhere else not only because I found the local politics appalling, but because I found my self appalling. Maybe I could heal myself that way. I had always fantasised about being a traveller. Now I could do that, once the trial – or jail time – was over. In fact, I decided I was going to leave. I had to take myself to the airport and fly myself away. I needed to fight this battle from another angle.
I went home again, timing it so that I could have lunch without having to accommodate Ms Motsepe’s current mood. But I couldn’t eat. I was completely out of sync with the rest of the working world. Nothing would ever be the same again. If I won my case I would always have that stigma of having been accused. If I lost I’d lose my job and I’d be back to square one: a failed writer, not to mention human being.
Would this goddamned day ever end? Was this what it was like to be old? You might be secure, but there’s nothing to do. No one sees you or cares about you. You have seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and even decades in which nothing of any value whatsoever happens. You wait out your days as your body gets colder and more uncomfortable and your children deign to call you when it suits them – if you have children, if they bother to call – and some invisible clock ticks away, as coldly indifferent as the planets in that night sky that keeps you awake. You could write a War & Peace of regrets, but no one would buy it. You wouldn’t buy it.
The phone rang and I almost jumped out of my skin. But it was, of all people, Shanti. She wanted to know how I was and I said I was fine, lying, knowing she’d know I was lying.
“How are you?”
“No, I’m fine thank you, Len.”
“Good,” I said, meaning it.
Pause.
“Len, I know about Kay.”
I grunted.
“She’s trying to win a battle but she’s going to lose the war,” she editorialised in that sing-songy way I’d missed for so many months, weeks, nights.
“Thank you,” I said. “How’s your thing going with old whatshisname?”
“Oh, that’s over,” she replied.
“Listen Shanti, I’m really sorry about the way I used to speak to you.”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly a colonial tea party, was I?”
“Maybe we could start an apologists’ club,” I said.
“Oh, but it would much too crowded for you,” she lilted.
I chuckled and could see her smiling and things could have gone back to the way they used to be in that silence, but instead I said: “So what’s up?’
“I just called to speak to Beauty too.”
Amazing what a little three-letter word can do for the spirits.
“Well, I don’t know if she can be bothered during her lunch break,” I said, which got her laughing, as of old.
“Len?”
“Yes, Shanti?”
“I’ve kept all the bond payments for these last few months and I’ll put them into your account.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said, gratefully.
“But I will,” she said, possibly trying to say something else.
“Thanks, Shanti,” I replied. “I’ll call Beauty for you.”
“Thank you.”
“Bye.”
They had their conversation and I still didn’t know what to do, so I went to my computer and saw that my application for emigration had been approved. Then I went out to Ms Motsepe’s room and told her she could take the afternoon off. It was ridiculous that she had to clean this house every day. I told her she could stay, but she only had to work here one day a week from now on. I would pay her the same as always so she could make some more money elsewhere. However, this was only going to be the case for the next year or two, unfortunately, because I was going away. She didn’t seem upset in any way and we came to an agreement about what would be a reasonable payout for her.
I went and sat on the front stoep. The sun was getting a little stronger, however erratically. I put on the sixteenth and listened to that man whose music had become the soundtrack to my life. “Must it be,” that great – but fading – work asks. “Yes, it must be,” it replies. There seemed to be a moment of universal silence as I sat there, basking in the sun, having finally accepted what remained of the day and making peace with my ex-wife.
Then the phone started ringing.
On Farewell
* * *
The sea is utterly still. It is terrifyingly calm. There isn’t a wave, a swell, a breeze – nothing. Even the accusing sky seems in cahoots with this vast, silent mass. There are no satellites to show that man has ever been there, but we know the little we know and this deck I stand on is real enough, as are the sleeping crew below decks. We are a 21-footer in an enormous ocean, heading towards the Land of Wiki, if we ever get there. We are more or less in the centre of the ring of fire, which was the whole idea. The others don’t know or need to know that I have come out here to farewell you. I have to put an end to it all. I have to let you go and vice versa. But now that the moment has arrived, of course, I hesitate.
If I were more superstitious than we all are, I might even see the first sign of movement as an omen, for the fog is moving in, like an army of ghosts. It soon envelops me and I might as well be the last man alive, if man be the word. I am sightless, unhearing. I am completely alone and must persuade myself that I am everything but. Apart from the sleeping sailors beneath me, apart from those clustered around my heart like a top-lit choir, I may be surrounded by the spirits of a hundred thousand others. How many have rowed, sailed and flown past this point before? Millions, thousands, hundreds, a few or none. It does not matter. It is time I spoke to you, and I am terrified.
How did I get here? I took your advice. I got out of that country. People said they would also leave if the same thing happened to them. I gave up trying to convince them that the decision had been made before your murder, that I wasn’t just leaving to forget but to fight. You don’t have to live in a country to love it, or change it. But it’s also true that there were other forces at work. My time at the Daily News had run its course. The trade unionist had been replaced by an accountant, who felt his salar
y had to be “on par with other CEOs’ remunerative platforms”. Who better, then, to get rid of than an ageing, opinionated white proofreader who was more interested in the fact of Beethoven’s genius than correcting reports on promises made by various egotists on leaky platforms? And I still think, all evidence to the contrary, that it’s sounder to be an optimist who is usually disappointed than a cynic who is never surprised. I can’t help it. I sit down and want to write about all the troubles of the world, but I feel good about the act. My spirits lift.
It is also true that I did not do this on my own. I have a beautiful, deeply efficient partner and I can just hear you say Frauke is your favourite daughter-in-law. She has borne you and Ma a grandson and I know you would have said that one day he’d have a beard. At this stage, however, he is still getting used to the idea of exploring everything, for, like you and me, he can’t sit still for one moment. They are safe in the house we bought in our new country. And, as these things happen, it’s in an area where solid, humble wooden houses were built for returning servicemen. The street names say it all: Tripoli, Alamein, Tobruk, where there has been trouble again. But then as soon as we got to this new country an earthquake tore into it; Lyttelton was particularly hard hit. In the meantime, we have started all over again. We took menial jobs, grateful for that, for the day, for the fact that we are in a country where the elderly, woman, children, animals and the dead are respected. Generally. We couldn’t believe that the land is not merely a succession of bloody histories but also shaped by myths, love stories.
But then I have subsequently read a local man’s increasingly dark love letters from North Africa, Italy and East Germany. Why did you never tell me about that mass pit you were all kept in after being captured; the terror of crossing a sea crawling with submarines; the torpor of Europe; the cold; the hard bunks; the boredom; the hunger (the never-ending hunger); the lice? Were the roads not lined with corpses when you left that camp, if only in body? Why did you never talk about that? Why did I never ask you? Was this the only good time, free time, you ever had, even if the rest consisted of never being able to see the world beyond barbed wire again?
I could also conjure up a story for you, thinking of that Italianate beauty in our living room. Who says you didn’t see such a Tina with glowing black hair, olive skin, brown eyes and luscious red lips on the rainy streets of Bari? Who says she didn’t transfix you as a few did me in my youth? But it’s only a story, a theory. All I have to go on is the fact that she resembles my mother in her youth, and that you happily paid to have her keep her hair raven black on a weekly basis until her death.
So here I am, effectively alone at sea, wearing that jacket you didn’t want, accompanied by a cough. You were quite right about the jacket; it is too bulky, and at our age we need all the streamlining we can get, don’t we? But did I ever tell you I wanted to run away to the sea? Of course I didn’t. I never told you anything. I, who repaid your generosity with sullen ingratitude, sensing that you wanted to live your dreams through me. Even when I “ran away” from home one school holiday you were delighted about it, encouraged it. Well, on that particular adventure a man took me out sailing on the Wild Coast and I discovered a momentary sense of peace. Out there it was just you and the silent power of the wind. I have waited a very long time to recapture that feeling, waiting as I did for answers from you. So I thought I would share it with you, finally, now that I have those answers. I thought I should sail out here and talk to you, farewell you, as they say in this new country, once and for all.
Still I hesitate.
This is not the first time I have tried to bid you goodbye; the previous attempt was mostly a disaster. I had seen the name White Island and knew I had to go there. So I drove to that foreign coast and boarded the motorboat, heading out to the active marine volcano. What, I wondered, had I been thinking? Was I going to ask the captain to cut the engines so I could do what I had to do in front of a bunch of day trippers, in broad daylight? Was I going to make a spectacle of myself, even in my most private moment? Could I not do it while everyone else was taking pictures of that approaching island, which may well have been enveloped in white cloud when Captain Cook saw and named it? That island which Maori revere, and fear. Perhaps, but it would have been too showy, too disrespectful.
The trip, however, wasn’t entirely unsuccessful: I saw my entire life in a tiny black bird, skimming the water. I tried to find a private corner on the roaring vessel, but someone else joined me, a bald old fart with a beard who felt he had to talk. When that failed he started whistling in a quavering way, which gave me the giggles, thinking of how you would have cut him to pieces – after the fact, of course. And then there were the boys, out on an educational trip. The kind of boys you’d like in your old-fashioned way; boys full of normal, boyish mischief: The fat boy sitting in the sun and spray, his white legs trilling with the motion. Another stealthily approaches, lean and dark, and slaps the tender inner thigh with a flat palm – and runs – followed by a series of very ungentlemanly eff yous.
So it wasn’t an entirely wasted trip, for I realised that I wasn’t just some white man spewing sulphur over a personal affront. I discovered that, even though I no longer lived there, I, too, am an African, and that I was shaped as much by the five decades I lived on that continent as anyone else. After all, did I not learn about the intelligence of Africa from the likes of Abdullah Ibrahim, Hugh Masekela, Lesley Makhene, Ruth and the incomparable Ms Beauty Motsepe? Was it not she, a simple servant, who told me the very African and universal truth that you were a big man, if only in years, and that you therefore had to be treated with respect? Would I have learned this lesson from such an ordinary person if I hadn’t grown up on that vast continent? Of course I could have, but at least we know that Africa does not only consist of power-hungry morons, bloated babies and beautiful sunsets.
Would I have been quite as free as I was if it hadn’t been for you and them? Does that all fall away just because I left? I think not, much as I miss everyone, including Kay Greenwood (such invention!), Klara Groenewald (such fortitude) and the likes of the cop who briefed me. Surely that white woman was also an African when she told me that I should rather remember you as you were than what your killers had done to you? Surely she was also weeping for what could have happened if your wife, my mother, was still alive? Was it not she who told us about how a man from Tembisa had shamed another octogenarian into a slow death over three months round about the same time? I tried to enter our kitchen, but the smell coming from there was no longer that of Highveld air or dog, and that’s all you ever smelled of: air and dog. My youth was finally, irretrievably, belatedly and deservedly over.
As for those fools who killed you, singular or plural, they could have been relatively rich. All they needed to have done was observe you and see you going to the bank and then your garage once a month, stacking away so much cash for your ungrateful son. But these unconscious agents of the Supreme Leader – fired by his own people so that he may be succeeded by a new Dingane – were not too stupid to know they were making choices. They were not pre-programmed animals. They chose to walk into the kitchen of an old soldier who knew his time to fight had finally come. They chose to bash your head in with Ludwig van Beethoven’s bust when you resisted them. They chose to tie you up when you carried on fighting, an old man driven mad by loneliness, decades of incarceration, disappointment and shattered dreams. They chose to ignore you as you started choking in your own blood, your broken nose broken once again, the last seconds of your life as frantic as the song ‘Son’, alone, and ending as abruptly in mid-phrase too. If they were black, did they intuit some kind of historical reciprocity? If not, they face the more serious charge of barbarism, just like their pale predecessors.
I must confess I was wholly surprised by Gerhard’s sermon. I never thought I’d agree with a minister of religion, but this time I did. Well chosen. What insight from such a supposedly foolish old man. I don’t know why you always chose to play the dunce
, but he seemed to transform in front of our very eyes, speaking not God’s own Methodist English but that real African language, Afrikaans. If he fondly called you a beautiful curmudgeon then he also perceived that your killers still had choices. They could repent or they could suffer the immense wrath of God. This was true beyond religious semantics. But you just did what an old soldier had to do, regardless of ideology. It is an ancient tale. You were the hero – are the hero, my hero – not them. Not because you were prepared to die for your country, but simply because you were prepared to live with the daily disappointment of your long, terrified life. They do not inhabit my dreams as you do, nightly. So, long may they and all they represent suffer the sentiment that five minutes of power can obliterate five decades, if not millennia, of love, service, influence. They are nothing until they start taking that dangerous first step of thinking about – and then acting upon – their actions.
But none of this really matters to you any more, does it? What you would really want to know is what happened to your friend, your companion. Well, after the police got a vet to sedate that dog who wouldn’t leave your side, which gave the newshounds their angle, he was put in a kennel for the night and I collected him the next day. My dog, Butch, was beside himself with joy. He played the poor thing back into shape, harassed it endlessly, kept it so busy that it didn’t have time to miss you during the day. But the damage had been done long before you saved his life and at night he keened for you. I couldn’t let him sleep inside. When we left he and Butch were taken over by friends of mine, Jay and Veronica Redland, and to this day they frolic in that most South African symbol of middle-class comfort, a swimming pool.
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